If you're only counting when YOU create and remove links, then you could put a hook and count from there. (without depending on anything within ext3)If, on the other hand, you're depending on when ANYBODY creates or removes a link (hard or soft), then you have a good bit more work to do. The only way that I can think of to do that would be to put a link into the ext3 driver -- but you wouldn't just have to log the symlink calls. you'd also have to track things like renames (in-directory vs cross-directory vs cross-filesystem) and unlinks (rm)

Given that it sounds like you're doing symlinks and the target files aren't actually being owned by the person in question, it doesn't sound like the quota system would do the job for you, so you're probably going to need tro either do some kernel hacking, or write a batch job that runs regularly that does the information collection for you.

Find or ls I can check for symbolic links, but the file system is very large. About 250GB and I have several of them. I was wondering if ext3 kept track of these things, apparently it does not.

At my university, we have physical storage in a filesystem, and we assign professors and students space by doing a symbolic link. Basically I want to keep track of physical storage with virtual/logical storage. Thats why I ask :-)